contremineur

Now the time has come to write a poem about a Paradise of Poets.

And when she kisses you wet with moonlight, kiss her back.

I liked to ride the train in the morning when fog burned away from the bay and the sky was filled with birds. I liked how tired I was and how little I cared about anything dying or having happened in my life and I just rode the click clack whistle-deep diesel machine past tent camps and scrap yards and backsides of strip malls where lines of defeated graffiti stayed old and employees took smoke breaks on folding chairs, wood logs, stacks of wet pallets or piles of old newspapers, four-gallon buckets turned upside down, and sat there with glazed eyes of anti- epiphany, decked out in cook shirts or ill-fitted business suits, nameless and watching the trains. I liked how lonely the world appeared at that hour when morning commuters were waiting in traffic and bakers were baking their all-butter pastries and dust floating over the deserts of Reno made everything west of them shine. I liked how final it seemed and impossible to cling to. The girl appeared in the junkyard and vanished. The boxer ran barking at something beyond. The skateboarder launched off the lip of the halfpipe and stayed where he was in the sky.